Lonicera

European honeysuckle is a vigorous deciduous twining climber native across much of Europe, North Africa, Turkey, and the Caucasus, valued for its intensely night-scented cream-and-pink flowers in summer and the wildlife value of its red autumn berries. In gardens it is a reliable, long-lived focal point for fences, pergolas, and trellises where its base can be kept cool and shaded. The honest catch is the toxicity of the berries: they contain saponins and are emetic, making the plant a hazard wherever small children or dogs have unsupervised access, so site it accordingly.

A vigorous, twining, semi-evergreen woody vine grown historically for its sweetly fragrant flowers that open white and age to yellow, scenting warm evenings, followed by small black berries. The honest catch, and it is a serious one: Lonicera japonica is one of the most aggressive invasive vines across much of the eastern and central United States. It smothers shrubs, young trees, and native ground layers under a dense blanket, girdles stems as it twines, and is listed as a noxious or invasive weed in many states. Do NOT plant it where it can escape into wild or unmanaged ground. For the same fragrance and far better wildlife value with none of the ecological cost, plant the native coral honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) instead.

Tatarian honeysuckle is not a plant to choose. It is a plant to identify and remove, and the reason so many of them are still standing is that in May they smell wonderful. Native to southern Russia and central Asia, it was brought to North America as an ornamental in 1752 and has escaped about as completely as a shrub can: Kew's checklist rows carry SIXTY-TWO introduced occurrences against thirteen native ones, the widest ratio of any plant authored for this catalog so far, running from Alaska, Alberta and Saskatchewan down to Texas, California and New Mexico, east to Nova Scotia, and back across Europe from Great Britain and Spain to Poland, Romania and Ukraine. Missouri Botanical Garden's own PlantFinder page for the species carries the flag "Midwest Noxious Weed: Do Not Plant". Minnesota lists it Restricted, which makes propagating or selling it illegal there. Wisconsin lists it Restricted under NR 40. Vermont's noxious weed quarantine makes it illegal to transport, buy or plant shrub honeysuckles at all. The mechanism is worth understanding rather than taking on faith, because it is what makes this shrub different from an ordinary weedy plant. It leafs out one to two weeks before the native shrubs around it and holds its leaves later into autumn, so the ground beneath is shaded through exactly the spring window that trillium, spring beauty, toothwort and the tree seedlings need, and it goes on shading it after the natives have finished. It then produces an enormous crop of red bird-dispersed berries that are rich in sugar and poor in fat, which is the wrong ratio for a bird trying to lay down fuel for migration; the same fruit deposits enough of the pigment rhodoxanthin that cedar waxwings moulting on a honeysuckle diet grow orange tail bands instead of yellow ones. And it has a field mark that settles identification in one cut: on older stems the pith between the nodes is HOLLOW, and the bark is shaggy and pale and peeling. Every native bush honeysuckle and every native Diervilla has solid white pith. Cut a stem, look at the end, and you will know within a second what you are dealing with. If what you actually wanted was a honeysuckle, the answer in eastern North America is Lonicera sempervirens, the native trumpet honeysuckle - a well-behaved hummingbird-pollinated vine rather than a thicket-forming shrub. This record exists so that you can name this plant, cut it correctly, and replace it.

Trumpet honeysuckle is the honeysuckle to plant, and the first thing to say about it is the thing that disappoints people: it has no scent at all. Missouri Botanical Garden calls the flowers large and non-fragrant, and that is not a defect, it is the whole design. The perfume people remember belongs to the moth-pollinated and bee-pollinated honeysuckles - Japanese honeysuckle, Tatarian honeysuckle, winter honeysuckle - and every one of those is an invasive problem in eastern North America. Lonicera sempervirens went a different way. Its flowers are narrow scarlet-to-coral tubes about 2 inches long, scarlet or orange outside and yellow inside, held in whorled clusters at the stem tips above a pair of leaves fused right around the stem, and they are odourless, red and deep because they are aimed at a bird. The ruby-throated hummingbird is the principal pollinator, the bloom starts in May in St. Louis and as early as March on the Gulf coast, and it repeats in flushes through the season rather than firing once. Small red berries follow in late summer, and robins, thrushes, finches and quail take them. It is also the well-behaved one: a twining woody vine of 8 to 15 feet, occasionally to 20, that climbs by wrapping rather than by rooting into everything, that Missouri Botanical Garden rates LOW maintenance, and that the Wildflower Center describes as not aggressively invasive. Three honest caveats. It twines, so it needs a structure from day one and it will not cling to a flat wall. It gets powdery mildew and aphids in still, humid, crowded air, which is a siting problem rather than a spraying problem. And its fruit crop is modest by comparison with the bush honeysuckles it replaces - a thinner display, made of better food, on a plant that stays where you put it.

Winter honeysuckle (Lonicera fragrantissima) is a plant to identify and remove, and the reason people keep planting it anyway is real rather than imagined. Its small paired creamy white flowers open on bare wood in the dead of winter and carry an intense lemon scent that reaches you across a garden on a still cold day, which is why Missouri Botanical Garden files it under the common name sweet breath of spring. MBG gives the bloom as March to April at St Louis; through the mid-Atlantic and the southeast it commonly opens in January, and there is almost nothing else in a temperate garden doing that. That is the honest case for the plant, and it is the whole of it. Everything after it is cost. MBG carries the Midwest noxious-weed notice on this species outright - listed as a noxious weed in one or more Midwestern states outside Missouri, and not to be moved or grown under conditions that would involve danger of dissemination. Kew's rows tell the same story in numbers: four native occurrences in China and the Amur, against TWENTY-ONE introduced ones, nineteen of them US states from Texas and Louisiana up through Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New York. It escapes into woodland edges, fence lines, floodplain margins and old fields, where it leafs out ahead of the native shrub layer, shades the spring ground flora, and forms the same dense understorey thicket its relatives make. The red berries that follow the flowers are the dispersal mechanism, not a wildlife benefit: birds eat them and carry the seed into woodland, and the exotic bush honeysuckles as a group produce carbohydrate-rich, low-lipid fruit that is poorer migratory fuel than the native fruit it displaces - spicebush (Lindera benzoin) berries are roughly a third to a half fat by dry weight, which is what a bird crossing a continent actually needs. MBG also lists deer among its tolerances, and a shrub deer will not eat, growing next to natives they will, wins the understorey twice over. If you want winter fragrance, wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox) and Bodnant viburnum (Viburnum x bodnantense) do the same job without the noxious-weed listing, and common witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) is the native that scents late autumn. If you want a honeysuckle, the answer in eastern North America is the native trumpet honeysuckle, Lonicera sempervirens, every time.